OASIS patent policy sparks boycott

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AC/DC

Guys, you seem to forget an old lesson from a very early elctrical technology. Edison Electric (yeah, that Edison) used to advocate DC electrical delivery. THere was a huge war over whether DC was safer (with funny little pictures of neatly attired electrons marching along in rank, vs. harried and hectic electrons rushing to and fro in an 'AC' electrical system, bumping into each other and falling over). Edison owned the electrical market in many cities in a way Microsoft never could, through eminent domain regulation.

However, we don't have DC systems. The bottom line is that AC was a superir technology for delivering power, and one by one the cities made the difficult step of converting to AC.

NTFS is a defacto standard for Windows systems because there is nothing available so compelling that those people who use NTFS want to go through the trouble to get something else. Can you run a Windows system with another non-Microsoft file system? I would be amazed if you could not. There must be a way to define an add-in which does this. Am I qualified to write one? No, not at the moment. Can I find one out on the network which will let me run something like a Unix file system? Yes, or HFS/Macintosh, or HPFS (OS/2), or any number of others.

Standards, and whether theya re open, is only part of the problem. Until developers build something from the open standards which is sufficiently useful to be more attractive than the licensed alternatives, no one will care whether the standards are open or not. No one cared about Linux until it matured to the level where it could actually be useful to commercial organizations. Once that happened, all of a sudden IBM and Sun are giving away patents.

If you want to fight the idea of roayalty based standards, then the exact right thing to do is keep writing useful systems which don't incorporate them. They'll die of their own accord, just like Betamax and eight-track tapes.

Posted by: gardoglee   Posted on: 02/22/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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